From andrewsullivan.com

Jeffrey Goldberg's latest piece from Kurdistan in the {right wing rag -p} New Yorker. It's easily the most important piece of journalism produced this year: judiciously reported, pellucidly written, morally strict. It starts with Goldberg's journey into the fledgling region of Kurdistan, the autonomous semi-state constructed by the Kurds betrayed and rejected by every major power for centuries. He reports on the horrors of what Saddam did in Halabja, and what, given a chance, Saddam and his proxies would do in this country and Israel if he is not stopped. What Goldberg shows is that Saddam's chemical attacks on his own citizens were not merely exercises in genocidal evil. They were target practice:

"An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam's nuclear weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja, military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing in order to study the dispersal of the dead. 'These were field tests, an experiment on a town,' Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army's procedures that day in Halabja. 'The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as 'How far are the dead from the canisters?''"

Even those who survived are hideously deformed, infertile, or sick. The children of the region die slow and awful deaths from lung cancer.
No one can say we haven't been warned.

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I can't speak for everyone, but I do not intend to support politicians who advocate we stand by idly while evil fanatics gain capabilities to do stuff like that to MY friends and family. That's one reason I'm not receptive and welcome to the Europen and leftist view that we should "negotiate" and learn to co-exist with these monsters. Historical evidence proves otherwise.

-p